Posted
by
Roblimoon Thursday January 10, 2013 @11:09AM
from the lamps-that-like-to-turn-each-other-on-and-off dept.

Many reporters go to the CES, AKA Consumer Electronic Show (warning - link landing page plays annoying sound) in Las Vegas to see the newest 42.001" LCD TVs, which are 0.001" bigger than last year's 42" models. And there are many boring Windows 8 devices, many of which both run Windows and can display the number 8. These items, along with keynotes from tech gurus like Bill Clinton (We're not making this up!) may be amazing to some news outlets, but not to Slashdot or to Our Man Timothy, who seeks out the new, the bizarre, and the unusual and -- without taking a dime from them -- lets their instigators talk to him about their wares. But it's got to be good stuff, not run of the mill incremental advances. Like the Good Night Lamp(tm), which was invented by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, whose "work has been exhibited," says the goodnightlamp.com/team page, "at the Milan Furniture Fair, London Design Festival, The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York." Now the Good Night Lamp people are showing off their product and trying to raise money through Kickstarter. But that's enough from us. We will now hand the microphone to Ms. Deschamps-Sonsino and let her tell you the rest.

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Timothy: Hi Alex, could you introduce yourself?

Alex: Hi. I am Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. I am the founder of the Good Night Lamp.

Timothy: The Good Night Lamp. What is that?

Alex: The Good Night Lamp is a family of internet-connected lamps. You have a Big Lamp and Little Lamps and you give the Little Lamps away to anyone around the world and when you turn your Big Lamp on, the little ones turn on. So you can collect Little Lamps through your family members; you might live abroad or in different cities. You might want to give a Big Lamp to your grandmother who lives by herself, and then you get a Little Lamp and you know when she is at home, she is doing stuff, she is just going about her daily life. If you have a daughter who has gone off to college, then she gets the Big Lamp, you get a Little Lamp and you know that she is coming home, she is safe, everything is good.

Timothy: How did you come up with the idea?

Alex: I came up with the idea when I was a student doing my MA in Interaction Design in 2005. And this is something that has been sitting there for a while, and then this year, in March last year actually, we decided, I decided to make a company out of it and tried to look for funding, and we have a little bit of seed funding from some friends, but now we want to get to the next level. We are on Kickstarter from last night. And so we are looking to raise some money to really make a first batch.

Timothy: Now Kickstarter projects often have some kind of a premium? Do you have something like that going?

Alex: Yes. We have, you can get a regular set if you give us £89 or more, but if you give us £150 or more, then you get to choose the veneers or the type of woods that you have on the lamps, and also the color of the Little Lamps, if you want them colored, and you also get a message engraved on the lamp if you want. And this is something that we will never do again because it is a lot of labor involved.

Timothy: Now your background is as a designer. Is this the first product that you brought this far from idea to reality?

Alex: Yeah. This is the first, this next step is Kickstarter phase and everything else is really new. I have always worked in prototyping and a lot with Arduino and this is built with Arduino. And this is really the first time we are experiencing what it is like to try to think about retail, to think about you know where this fits into people’s lives, and how do you market it?

Timothy: Now what about the software that runs it? Are you giving people access to that in any way? Are you using a system Arduino that is associated with a lot of open source developers?

Alex: Yeah. I mean what we are doing at the moment is trying to figure out how best to make the product and then how best to make it open source afterwards. Because it has a lot of those types of technologies, and the platform we are using to prototype is open source. And then eventually what we want to do is have, kind of, DIY kits that everybody can use. Because the infrastructure of connecting lamps isn’t that complicated technologically. It is more about – the use case is more about the product itself, it is more about trying to find something that everyone can relate to.

Timothy: Now these ambient devices, they are sort of subtle; they are not too in-your-face. Can they do anything else besides light with white LEDs inside?

Alex: What we want to be able to build is basically a kind of a platform, a hardware platform for people to start opening that up and then building more for themselves. So we will have RGB LEDs available and only use them on whites, but if you want to hack it then you can open it up and try to use different colors. And then that will also give us a direction as to whether that is a real need, and people really want to see red lights for Christmas or green lights for you know, whatever, whatever day of the year. And then try to experiment with okay well, what if you plug other services on top of that? And what if one of your Little Lamp, one of your Little Lamp is a Skype lamp, for example, and you know, a Twitter lamp, or whatever it might be. So every time you’re added, then you get a little, kind of, burst of light, and whether that makes sense? But we want to focus on the core user kind of experience for now, and then build on top when everything goes well on Kickstarter.

Timothy: And do you know where is the most interesting place that any of these are in use right now?

Alex: Well, right now we have our prototypes for ourselves, but people have suggested kind of really interesting uses and also trying to work with light as a Morse code, so if something’s happening and you want your friends to call you, then ‘call me now,’ and like click click click

Timothy: Are you turning on any lamps in London from here in Las Vegas?

Alex: No we are not because it is a little bit expensive on our roaming and charges. So we are doing the minimum of viable setup for CES but we are super excited and people are super nice here.

He's very charming. That's why he is used by the global elite to make so much horror palatable.

Two years later, McAfee brought out GW - I guess in the pursuit of "balance".

My dear God! I was embarrassed for the fellow - blinking under the lights. I cannot believe that this fellow can collect a speaker's fee, for talking about his daughters and painting pictures of dogs, at an InfoSec show!

"That's about all you need to know about Clinton and the Internet."Sure, if you are a biased moron and got all your information from/. headlines.

The Clipper CHip was about creating secure communications. In 1993 he talked about it, and it's a good idea. Then the flaws of it were presented, and concerns rolled in and he stopped prompting. It was dead by 1996.

And a president singed an Veto proof bill? shocking. I like how you overlook his pressure to add, what became, section 230.

If you boil any presidency down to a few out of context things, you are being stupid.

"Sure, if you are a biased moron and got all your information from/. headlines."

A base insult! I ALSO get my information from Fark headlines! So there!

Anyway;a)Clinton tried to get the clipper chip, or its equivalent, through three times, at least accoding to Slashdot headlines. I'd normally use Fark headlines, but I don't think it existed back then.

b)While the Communications Act, as a whole, was pretty much a done deal, Clinton actually called out the portion of it that contained the CDA during the signin

Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.

Offtopic, but I always thought this meme was just something that happened in the movies. Is (American?) plumbing really that bad that when someone else opens a tap or flushes a toilet, you immediately get boiled in a shower? For real?

It's just that I've never encountered this effect anywhere. Sure, sometimes the hot water would be out due to a malfunctioning heater or something, but never had this effect of scal

Comparing it to the plumbing from my stay in Russia.In Russia, apartments were set up so the whole building had one hot/old water supply, and a lot of pipes going around to each area. Meaning opening a couple faucets (or flushing toilets) of one type wouldn't drastically reduce that type's pressure. It's cheaper, no toilet flush issue (usually minor anyway), however, if others use up all the hot water, there's none left until t

It depends on the plumbing but yes if there is no device balancing the hot and cold supply pressures then with a sudden drop in cold water pressure then the proportion of hot to cold can suddenly change.

Although it is more common for opening a hot tap downstairs to drop the pressure of the hot water upstairs resulting in an icy blast of cold water. It is mostly a drawback of gravity based systems. Where a hotwater storage tank is used along with a header tank to provide the pressure. Mains water usually i

The problem is that some people don't have pressure balancing valves in their shower, especially in older homes and are too cheep or lazy to get them put in. My house had that problem and it wasn't that hard to fix if you know how to solder copper pipe.

No one gets "scalded" with today's modern hot water heaters, unless they have tampered with the thermostats. From the factory, the thermostat is set to 130 degrees. Someone flushing might cause you to get some uncomfortably warm water, but no scalding showers.

I do tamper with my thermostats. My water is 150 degrees. It's enough to scald, if you happen to be sensory deprived, incapacitated, and/or retarded. But, everyone in my home has decent reflexes, good sense of touch and feel, and everyone has an I

In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often
I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a
woman in Madagascar. She said, "Cut it out." -- Steven Wright

Is the android-powered butt plug. No shit. It's got wifi and a web server so you can browse your ass and control the vibrations. There's also a web cam but I don't know why... there's no light and the camera will probably be covered with lube. (Hmm... sounds like a new instagram filter).

I can see how people like the super easy concept.In practice I don't see people pressing the button to change their status.So maybe needs to be even simpler - motion/heat sensor - no motion/heat for 10 minutes turn off the remote lights.

Off to collegeIt’s hard when your children leave the nest, so give them a Big Lamp and you won’t have to feel like you’re nagging them for news. They’ll want to keep in touch with their school friends too.

Ugh. When I moved out of the country to go to university, my folks just called me if they wanted to talk, usually on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes we'd talk for a couple of minutes, sometimes for an hour.

This is a product for people who can't be arsed to make an effort to communicate with people they allegedly love.

It sounds like it's aimed at empty nest parents who want to feel connected to their kids without constantly bugging them. You spend 18 years seeing someone every day, sitting down to meals and talking with them... when they move out it can be hard. You miss them and want to talk to them, but you know that they need their own space in order to move on and grow. I think this is a good way of being psychologically connected in a minimally obtrusive way. Certainly doesn't replace talking to people, but does mak

More than anything I was interested to figure out what the leading indicators of the next industry bubble would be(after being in college during the 90s.com fun). My takeaway from this is while it's a fun gimmick, it's a solution looking for a problem. The fact it's getting traction in conversation is fascinating and provides greater insight than the concept itself.

This product is significant because it will be the first online appliance that most non-geeks will discover.

After people get used to the Good Night Lamp, they won't bat an eyelid when their car tweets that it has just received a parking ticket (and by the way, the front left tire is half-flat). They'll take it in good stride when their refrigerator emails to say that it is shutting down unless the six-month-old lump of rotting blue cheese is removed by midnight.

This summary was perhaps one of the worst I've ever seen in Slashdot history.

Hint: Summarize whatever the hell it is you are linking to. Don't try to shoehorn in a half-critique of CES, plugs for our very own Timothy(okay...), and OMIGOSH Bill Clinton, can you actually believe that, no I'm not making it up, like wow!

The major problem, is that I have no clue if you are attempting to poke fun at the lamp, if it really is cool, are you linking to a fake product parody page?

It's a flawless execution of the old wake someone up in the middle of the night prank. They eliminated the slight percentage of failures caused by the person hearing you sneaking in and waking them up. Now you can blast some light straight into their retina at 2:00 AM with the push of a button.

This may be good for elderly relatives living on their own. When they turn their lamp on in the morning, you know they are ok. If it doesn't turn on by a certain time, have the police (or a trusted neighbor) run a "welfare check" on them.

This may be good for elderly relatives living on their own. When they turn their lamp on in the morning, you know they are ok. If it doesn't turn on by a certain time, have the police (or a trusted neighbor) run a "welfare check" on them.

Good point, unless your elderly relative is a little forgetful and doesn't see the point in turning a lamp on while the sun is up.

Please stop producing useless garbage in fancy plastic and metal coverings and give us high speed internet. And when I say high speed, I don't mean that watered down swill your ISP sells you. I mean "set my harddrive on fire downloading torrents" speed. I mean multiple 1080p streams of video over one pipe. I do not need an iWhatever, or a remote-controlled lamp... I need a network connection that doesn't suck so hard it's in danger of forming its own event horizon.

I don't care if it's wireless, or runs over copper or fiber, or if you have to shoot lasers through the sky. Get it done, people. We're about ten years late to the party as it is right now -- our infrastructure is rotten. Shannon's Law is kicking our butts, and we can only re-arrange bits of metal and plastic and input devices in clever new ways for so long before it's just old and busted.

These do dads is what will bring you more bandwidth. The more a large percentage of consumers use it, the more ISPs will make available.This doesn't me you need to use them.If it wasn't for people wanting media, we would all still be using 1 mb connections.

If you want more bandwidth, it's available. I suspect what you want is more bandwidth for the same price.

These do dads is what will bring you more bandwidth. The more a large percentage of consumers use it, the more ISPs will make available

Seriously? Let's do the math. If every single person in America had a lamp, and switched it 5 times a day, and each lamp switch command required (factoring in overheads) 500 bytes, that would generate:

Because you right slow witted, ignorant shit like this:"when someone steals our shit and we KNOW they stole it, we confront them ourselves without police involvement. If they don't give it back we smash their teeth in with a baseball bat. That's how I got my bicycle back,.. as the dude was in the middle of painting it over... I walked up, bat in hand, and dude gave it right back claiming someone sold it to him (yea? then why paint it over?)"

Innovation in consumer electronics died the moment the Average Joe decided they only wanted a toy handheld computer and not the real thing, somewhere in the mid-2000s. That's when technology just got too hard for the average consumer, and instead of harnessing the potential of a handheld computer, the tech industry gave them a tarted-up big-screen version of their old Motorola and began to produce these silly art-school-project doodads to tickle their sense of whimsy.

The opposite being just as true.Now, I love my family, but broadcasting that I'm home with the implication that I want to chat, well, I can imagine getting annoyed and unplugging that thing -- and then the police shows up later because my mom though something bad happened to me and got scared (and said 'You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air")

1. Instead of selling/producing the large lamp. they should develop a module with embedded WiFi that goes between any lamp and the power circuit. That way you could use any lamp with the system.2. Instead of selling separate little home lamps and, presumably, having multiple lamps, what they should do is develop a "Christmas Village" type product with multiple houses, street, etc. Each miniature house would then light up based on the status of the paired module.3. Create virtual "Christmas Village" software/web page

For the "Christmas Village" piece, it could have different scenes: Winter, Suburbs, Big City, Summer cottages, etc. In fact, if they did it right, they could develop the village layout that allows for skins for each of the houses, landscape, etc. which could be changed based on the season, etc... For example, this would allow the user to set up a village with an office building, cottage, house, etc. You could add grass, asphalt, water, snow landscape skins, etc.

Personally, I think that it would be cool to see a miniature village light up when my sisters, parents, nephews, etc. are home. At least I would then know when to call them to wish them a happy birthday, etc.

I really don't see why someone in China hasn't started cranking out some knockoff TRIAC modules and got the price down to where every switch & socket in a house/office/factory can be on this.

Because most people don't want it and wouldn't use it. You can buy X10 switches for about $15, so if you really want all of your switches to have cheap controllers, you can do it now.

Whoever wired my house didn't even bother to properly label 10 circuit breakers, do you really think they are going to take the time to map out and label 2 dozen switches and outlets throughout the house?

And who wants to go downstairs to the home automation panel to enable an outlet just to run the vacuum cleaner.

Later developments (1997) of hardware are improvements of the native X10 hardware. This is called "Advanced X10" or A10. These devices contain improved hardware with a receiver and transmitter allowing two-way communication between the devices

It is worth noting that not everyone is always watching their IM, etc. A signal to people who are NOT online that your status has changed is not without its uses.

Add in some kind of color changing mechanism, so that you can sync colors, and you can send a large number of message. "Two blue blinks means the cops are on their way, clear out!", for example.

Heck, I HATE it when I am summoned from my home office for dinner by someone shouting down the stairs at me. It breaks my concentration hideously. Having a signaling device like this with no annoying vocal component would actually be useful to me. Others in my family aren't online all the time; they can't/won't just send me an email to let me know dinner is ready.

We live in the dying days of a great empire. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can change this -- not by individual or collective action. Thus, we should eat the bread and attend the circuses. Our descendants (well, your descendants, I'm not spawning) will envy us for having the kind of surplus resources that allows the creation of things like this. Enjoy it while you can; refusing to enjoy it won't change anything, except your happiness level.

The connected rabbit could do this, you move the ears and if so set up via "communing" the ears at the other rabbit moved also. It was better than thatlamp as you could send a message also and the message would be read out loud, or send a song for that matter with lightshow and choreographed ear motions.

So instead of being kept awake with all the beeps and tweets and flashing lights from your phone or tablet as your friends check in, now your room will never be dark as all these lamps fire up.

Seriously, I know its great to be social, but we don't have to be so connected as to know when friends and family walk in the door. There is something to be said about having a little privacy these days. Maybe I might start a Kickstarter project for a button that can be pressed that just ejects you out of the social

Trademarks need to be defended. So if the Good Night Lamp is trademarked, and mentioned somewhere without the (tm) note, the company needs to write a letter pointing out that the name is indeed trademarked and needs to be marked as such. Easier to just put the (tm) on it in the first place.

What would they be defending it against? It was used in the proper context to refer to the item they are selling.

If Timothy had talked about a range of lights from multiple manufacturers as all being 'good night lamps ' then there would be devaluation of the trade mark. Similarly if he had turned it into a verb, saying "I'll good-night-lamp when I go to sleep, so don;t call if the light is off" then there might also be devaluation.

I'm at a loss, however, to see what you think is being devalued here and woul

well given that the band in question is a bunch of cool folks (assuming you are not in fact a band member or a man of Scottish decent) you may not be getting a letter from the band Albanach discussing why you are using that name (unless you just use it here).

Xerox Keenex and Band-Aid all used to be trademarks but have suffered from genericide.

Correct, there's no requirement for the 3rd party to honor the rule. But unlike a patent which stays valid even if I don't do anything with it (so I might lose the right to damages if I delay prosecution), the owner of the trademark needs to be able to demonstrate that they were paying attention to the use by others, or they can lose the trademark for good. Still have a folder here from a trademark we registered, and had to fight with the trademark office over for 3 years when they determined we weren't r